Course:In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound poem)
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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Cw for mentions of fascism and antisemitism in the links.
Ezra Pound’s 1913 poem “In a Station of the Metro” is only fourteen words long and has no verbs. Here it is:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
I’m no Ezra Pound fan: he was a fascist and an antisemite, and to be honest, I’m not really into his other poems or Modernist poetry generally. The first poetry teacher I ever had, one of my favorite people I’ve ever learned anything from, was a huge Modernism fan; we spent weeks reading all of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, picking it apart line by line to see how it worked. We read some Pound as well, maybe this poem, although I don’t remember.
In fact, I have no idea when I first encountered this poem, which still chases me constantly. The phrase “petals on a wet, black bough” is one of those things my brain has chosen to chant, some days, dozens of times in a row. I think about it every time it rains in Vancouver (so, pretty often). For a while, I forgot where it was even from. That was how I found this poem again. So that’s something. It’s a mysterious quality, the ability of a poem–a single line, really, or an image–to chase you down like that. What makes it happen? Is it Pound’s use of sound? The efficiency of his language? The accessibility of the image? The feeling of a portal opening, then snapping shut, like a camera’s shutter? It’s all of those, I think. This poem feels like it’s been in my brain since before I was even born. While I’m not sure I’m capable of writing something that makes someone feel that way, I’m having fun trying.